ChippenhamRed

Personally I would suggest reducing the number of host cities would just condense fans into a smaller number of larger groups which wouldn’t help anything. Likewise any single nation offering to host. I suspect the tournament will either happen as planned, or not at all. It the situation continues to worsen it would seem inconceivable that it could take place, but then again June is still a way off.

Awful lot of misinformation and guess work here. Fatality rate currently appears to be around 1%, which makes it 10 times more deadly than ordinary flu, in addition to being substantially more contagious, and without the protection of the flu vaccine that vulnerable members of our society in the UK benefit from. This means the threat is very substantially greater than flu, with the prospect of killing far more people and overwhelming our health services. So the dismissive comments further up this thread might well be misguided. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/coronavirus-truth-myths-flu-covid-19-face-masks

Data is still sketchy but most reputable sources now seem to be saying it has a substantially higher death rate and is more contagious, not least of all because vulnerable people are not vaccinated against it - unlike flu. Incidentally I’m due to take my son up to Wembley for the first time next month, I suspect that’s increasingly likely to be cancelled now. Will be interesting to see what happens to the Euros if it goes pandemic.

Yeah, we should make no attempt to stop the spread of a highly contagious infection at all, let it overwhelm our health services and just accept that 1 in every 200 healthy young people who get it will die.

Hate this attitude. Of course we all love to hate Rovers but I would always draw the line at wishing them out of existence. I know plenty of Rovers fans and they’re not all “rotten to the core”. They’re ordinary people who enjoy football and love their club. They’re colleagues, fellow parents at the school, old school mates, even friends. It’s their misfortune that they follow the one they do, but at least they are backing a local team. We have plenty of less desirable characters amongst our own support - how would you like to be tarred with the same brush as them? I enjoy banter with my Rovers-supporting friends, I laugh at their tinpot club in their tinpot ground...but I don’t want their club not to exist. It means something to them and I can respect that. And I would miss the rivalry. If you genuinely consider ALL supporters of a rival club to be “rotten” people, I would suggest football means too much to you.

If you supported an Arsenal, a Spurs or even a Leeds I could sympathise with your “simply dreadful” assessment. But you don’t. You support Bristol City, a team who historically have generally sat between the second and third tier, have never won a trophy and haven’t competed in the top division for 40 years. Currently we are mid table in the Championship, have just narrowly lost to a side playing Premier League football last season, having won our previous two matches, and we remain in contention for a play off spot with two thirds of the season remaining. We are not Brazil 1970. And we are not as consistent as you might hope us to be. We aren’t special by any means. But with the exception of one season in 2007/08 this is about as far from “simply dreadful” as we have been for 30 years.

If you can’t give the team credit when they’ve won without dominating, does that mean you are happy to praise them when they lose despite dominating? That happens too. Or is it just not possible for you to give any credit at all?

Fair enough.

I generally attribute it to a lack of maturity or ability to keep a reasonable perspective, and unrealistic expectations of supporting an unremarkable second tier football club.

Wow. I think we understand better than most that Pulis isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, to say the least, but I wouldn’t have expected that strength of feeling from a fan of a team he got promoted and established in the top division.

Re “massively valid” are you referring to Pulis? Surely you can’t dislike him that much after everything he achieved at Stoke?

If there really was a “gulf in class” between these two sets of players, would they be five points behind us and playing in the same division?

A few of the usual suspects who are strangely silent when we are rather inconveniently winning.

Even if it was “that bad” Fordy, it’s still a pathetically childish reaction with the outcome of the match still far from certain.

That is utterly pathetic. One down with 45 minutes still to play. I really wonder if people who do that have any clue about what it means to be a football supporter. People like to say we’re supporters not customers...that is the behaviour of the latter.

Astonishing outburst. He might struggle to survive that. I also find it rather odd that he chose to directly compare them to us. We are literally not in their league. They are competing with other L1 clubs, not us, so that should be his frame of reference. If money was no object for all the other L1 clubs he might have a point...but Rovers are currently lower in the table than megaclubs such as Accrington Stanley, Fleetwood Town and Shrewsbury. It suggests he has an unhealthy obsession with us that is distracting him from the job in hand.

I don’t think it’s a dawn of any description. But I do think it shows we are still capable of winning games in this division, our summer recruitment doesn’t appear to be that bad, we have replaced certain players, and probably won’t be relegated. All accusations that have been made in recent weeks without any sort of decent sample size of games on which to judge. Time will tell, but let’s at least give this squad a chance to impress.

£23m of talent out the door but only one defeat in the first five, consecutive clean sheets and consecutive away wins. I’ll take that. There’ll be a few posters we don’t hear from tonight.

100% agree.

It’s a turn of phrase. And factually accurate.

In a heartbeat. Experienced and has a championship promotion on his CV.

Which wouldn’t necessarily have been the correct decision. In fact, had he been sacked the season before last and the new man had come in and guided us to the league cup semis and an 11th place finish, everyone who have said it was the right decision to get rid of him. The club’s faith has been rewarded with three seasons of league position improvement under Johnson. An inconvenient truth for some. Not to say he’d survive another bad run if this continues - I think he’d be gone, and I would be fine with that. The feast and famine can’t continue forever.

You don’t know that. The “LJ will never be sacked” theory is a complete myth. It’s on record that his position was considered at our low point in 16/17. It would almost certainly be reconsidered once again if we’re in or around the bottom three at Christmas.

I’m not one for the panic button but you have to say, if we don’t start winning games soon the pressure is going to build very quickly on LJ after last season’s capitulation. And that won’t make winning any easier - a vicious cycle.

That’s a bit silly. If we were playing Real Madrid it would be an entirely reasonably scoreline. Against Boro, less so.